Swedish alternative dairy maker Oatly is among thousands of companies with a 100 percent renewable electricity goal. It is one of the few — alongside Mars, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble — to explicitly outline plans for thermal heat in that commitment.

Oatly’s commitment, updated in May 2025, is to source 100 percent of its energy including electricity and thermal heat from renewable sources in Europe by 2030. The company gave itself five additional years to meet that goal in North America, because there are fewer options in the region.

Energy accounted for 16 percent of Oatly’s carbon footprint in 2024, its latest reporting year. It hasn’t set absolute greenhouse gas reduction goals. Rather, its target is to reach a 40 percent cut by 2030 in climate emissions per liter of product. 

“Our decarbonization strategy includes a couple of very simple steps,” said Erin Augustine, vice president of global sustainability at Oatly. “The first is energy efficiency everywhere. Use less electricity, use less steam, use less heat all across the board and make sure our processes are operating efficiently. We need to make operational improvements before we even get to capital improvements.”

Eliminate steam where possible

Close to 75 percent of the energy used in factories operated by Oatly and its production partners in 2024 came from natural gas and other fossil fuels used to generate steam and hot water for processing oats and keeping equipment clean. Between 2020 and 2024, Oatly expanded from three factories to six, including two in the U.S.

Most of these processes require temperatures at or below 200 degrees Celsius, or 392 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s fairly typical for food companies, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. 

Oatly sourced 38 percent of the energy it uses from renewable alternatives in 2024; 11 percent of that amount was for thermal processes, according to its 2024 sustainability metrics. The thermal figure includes biofuels used by some suppliers, along with biomethane certificates that Oatly buys to match energy consumed by its plant in Landskrona, Sweden.  

Those strategies are a stop-gap, however, while Oatly evaluates ways to reengineer its processes to rely less on boilers that use natural gas. 

These are board-level decisions. Each factory has an annual energy reduction target and is expected to measure progress monthly. Assessments are ongoing at all of the company’s manufacturing facilities, and Augustine’s team is closely aligned with the global engineering and supply chain teams.

“We work closely with the various functions within our sustainable operations team to develop the operational strategy and the accountability and [how to] embed all the decisions into our processes so that we can make progress on our targets and meet our targets,” she said. (Before being named to her current rule last July, Augustine was focused on supply chain sustainability.)

One strategy Oatly plans to encourage across all of its factories, including those of its suppliers, is better use of waste heat and hot water to redirect more thermal energy to places it’s needed. For example, Oatly’s facility in Millville, New Jersey, installed heat exchangers to recycle waste heat, which reduces natural gas consumption required for steam. 

“The first step in our strategy is to identify all those processes and find other ways to get the heat,” Augustine said. “Once we’ve done all the de-steaming we can, then our intention is to generate steam differently.” 

For the next phase of its plan, Oatly is evaluating industrial heat pumps, which can turn waste heat into higher temperature resources, and boilers that run on electricity, biomass or natural gas alternatives. “Start with heat pumps and heat exchangers,” she said. “That is the nearest available technology that is working for food processing companies.”

Whiskey maker Diageo uses electric boilers at some of its distilleries, but many systems Oatly is studying aren’t widely adopted. For example, industrial heat pumps accounted for just 2 percent of the global heat pump market in 2021, according to research firm Energy Innovation.   

Oatly’s Landskrona factory installed hybrid equipment that can run on biomass but switch to natural gas if necessary. But the availability of cheap natural gas in the U.S. makes heat pumps and electric boilers more difficult to justify, especially when equipment is relatively new, Augustine said.  

Oatly will share more details on how it’s reckoning with industrial heat in a GreenBiz 26 session that also includes Johnson & Johnson and Suntory.

The post How Oatly takes the steam out of its industrial emissions appeared first on Trellis.

Decarbonizing the emission-intensive process used to produce lime, a key ingredient in steel, iron, agriculture and other industries, has the potential to avoid or remove gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually. That goal moved closer to reality over the past week as three startups working to achieve it took significant steps forward.

Using $2 million in backing from Stripe, Shopify and Google, two European startups will accelerate research and development as they gear up to commercialize zero-carbon processes for lime production. And an Israeli startup announced plans to construct a second pilot facility as it too scales.

Lime’s natural ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be leveraged to capture carbon in ocean waters and at desalination plants. There are also plans to decarbonize maritime transport by using lime to capture CO2 from ships’ exhausts. And if used in steel production or as a soil additive in agriculture, low-carbon lime would cut emissions from both sectors.

High-emissions production

Conventional production involves heating limestone (calcium carbonate) at high temperatures — generated by burning fossil fuels — to produce lime (calcium oxide). The reaction and burning of fuels release around 0.8 metric tons of CO2 (tCO2) for every ton of lime, which more than outweighs any capture that takes place once the lime is utilized. A low or zero-emissions alternative could tip the balance the other way.

Leilac, a U.K. startup that received research money from the tech companies, has developed a method for capturing the CO2 created during the reaction and heating process using renewable sources. The funding — which was channeled through Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers — will be shared with SaltX, a Swedish startup that uses a plasma torch to power the reaction and also captures the carbon released. 

A third startup in the race, Israel’s CarbonBlue, said this week that it planned to build a second demonstration plant. Rather than starting with limestone, the company uses renewable energy to transform calcium-rich waste from the steel and construction industries into lime. 

Impact of commercialization

All three companies have plans to build commercial-scale lime production facilities in the next few years. If they can produce lime at prices competitive with conventional methods, or at least within reach of buyers willing to pay a premium, the output from the plants could help drive carbon removal schemes that rely on lime. 

They could also help change the emissions equation for industries that use lime as an input. A 2024 study from South Pole, an environmental consultancy, looked at the potential impact of low-carbon lime on the European iron and steel industries. Using carbon capture and renewable energy during lime production, together with methods to increase the absorption of CO2 by lime after production, could transform lime’s contribution from emissions of 6.0 million tCO2 to removals of 5.8 million tCO2.

“Lime production is a hard to abate sector,” said Oscar Rueda, a former principal consultant at South Pole and co-author of the report, “but it has the potential to turn into a net negative sector.”

The post Stripe, Shopify and Google accelerate progress toward zero-emissions lime appeared first on Trellis.

Browse social media on any given day and you’ll notice a glaring disconnect. At a casual glance, the news reveals a polycrisis defined by geopolitical instability, growing inequality, environmental degradation and social polarization. 

In response, corporations generate inspiring content, breathless invitations to bring your whole self to work and C-suite-bylined advertorials peppered with sustainability jargon but lacking in substance. Meanwhile, sustainability practitioners remain embroiled in esoteric debates over climate accounting or impact measurement, all suffused with a broad, inchoate rage against ‘the system’.

You can tell that sustainability is in trouble simply by the fact that numerous articles keep insistently telling us it’s alive and well. But I’m sure you, like us, have numerous examples (or personal experience) where sustainability is being quietly rebranded, shuffled to a less influential location on the organizational chart or quashed outright.

Just five years ago, sustainability was framed as “the right thing to do,” with a watertight win-win business case. Shareholder primacy was seen as regressive and we were all confident that stakeholder capitalism was proceeding inexorably. 

Now, sustainability is fractious, politicized and besieged. The political headwinds are real and blowing harder by the day. Doubling down and resisting this criticism is a natural reaction, and where much of the sustainability community is, quite naturally, focusing. We understand; it’s exasperating to hear more critiques from the very people that ought to be on your ‘side.’

But, there’s little prospect of countering all this criticism, or framing a compelling path forward, unless we acknowledge our own part in getting to this point. (For the avoidance of doubt, the authors of this piece fully acknowledge that we are also part of this problem!)

The elite capture of sustainability 

To understand how we helped fuel  the current situation, let’s start with the idea of elite capture. This  happens when privileged individuals and organizations appropriate tangible and intangible resources for their own benefit. Think of prominent NGOs that spend more time writing grants and presenting in boardrooms than actually helping communities on the ground. The term was first used in the context of foreign aid and more recently has been applied to the social and political realm of ideas, knowledge, expertise, data, brands, and networks. 

In 2025, Musa Al-Gharbi published We Have Never Been Woke, in which he identifies a dominant class he calls ‘symbolic capitalists.’ These are professionals who work with ideas, data, and narratives — journalists, academics, tech workers and non-profit leaders. While symbolic capitalists tend to emphasize egalitarianism and social justice, they’re the primary beneficiaries of the systems of inequality they claim to oppose. Sustainability practitioners sit squarely in this category because sustainability has an elitism problem and it takes several forms.

On the most basic level, we see it when organizations spend a lot of time talking about inequality, climate change and other sustainability concerns, but stop short of taking concrete actions to address these issues. Are you spending a lot of time talking about inclusive communities, while your company doesn’t pay a living wage? 

Next, we see an obsession with obscure, alienating terminology. Sustainability professionals  love to joke about reporting overload and three-letter acronyms, but it isn’t funny. This is a way to make the ideas impenetrable and technical, so that there are professional opportunities for interpreters, in the form of advisors and consultants. Yes, issues like climate change are scientific and technical, but tackling climate change is, above all, a question of social and political organization. If we can’t bring people along with us, all the measurement frameworks in the world aren’t going to help.

Another problem: assessments, certifications and reporting frameworks are squarely designed for the benefit and use of large, Western multinationals. These companies have the capacity and budget to gather and report data, often after hiring expensive communication consultants. 

Little thought has been given to the needs and priorities of smaller businesses, let alone businesses in developing countries. While the drivers behind measuring Scope 3 emissions, to take just one example, are real and understandable, this is also a way to impose controls, costs and liability on smaller and less powerful suppliers. Also, isn’t it a little weird to think of American businesses lecturing companies in Brazil and India on issues like plastic waste?

Open doors or brick walls

It’s important to ask if the corridors of power lead to open doors or brick walls. For example, it’s common to argue that it’s the responsibility of the sustainability team to cover ‘stakeholder engagement’. Implicit in this argument is the notion that if you can delegate responsibility for those inconvenient, annoying, value-sucking stakeholders to a relatively powerless team, the rest of the company is free to focus on its primary goal — maintaining shareholder value.

Even worse, the powerless team in question is highly selective about which stakeholders it deems worthy of attention. We might focus, for example, on a cocoa farmer in West Africa or a factory worker in Bangladesh. To be sure, these human beings are at the forefront of environmental and social risk, and need concrete help. But, when it comes to less photogenic examples, such as coal workers in Pennsylvania or meatpackers in the Midwest, we tend to dismiss their fears of losing jobs and livelihoods, or even frame them as climate deniers.

In short, it’s no wonder many ordinary people consider sustainability to be an irrelevant, elitist waste of money and time. In fact, stakeholders are savvy enough to see when a business is intentionally creating a distracting aura around something. Building trust shouldn’t be treated as a metric, but rather the outcome of consistent actions over time.

Beginning to fix elitism

As a start, we might focus on whether a business pays a living wage to its workers and contractors. We might also focus on employee ownership models, and look more closely at incentive and reward structures. If these efforts lack credibility, perhaps the social impact or community engagement programming is just a virtue-signaling effort.

We might also focus more intently on what a company’s government relations and lobbying efforts look like, and to what degree the company is facilitating or encouraging the political practices its sustainability report aims to tackle. 

We might also acknowledge and give credit to the companies that are honest about failure and complexity, and approach neat, curated accounts of achievements with much more skepticism. We might even look at how much effort and budget is spent measuring and reporting issues, rather than addressing them.

Most of all, we might stop lecturing and educating, and start listening and learning. What do organizations in emerging markets have to teach large, Western multinationals? What can we do to avoid dumping responsibility and liability onto suppliers and communities at the forefront of the problems we caused?

As many of the core underlying assumptions behind sustainability continue to dissolve, it’s time for more reflection, more plain language and a direct focus on fairness, basic dignity and respect. There isn’t a simple way out of the political mire, but this would be a good start.

The post Why we’re all part of sustainability’s elitism problem appeared first on Trellis.

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.​

Thanks to an increased push for transparency in corporate climate actions, customers and regulators alike have caught on to a chronic pattern of promises being made and forgotten. Key climate standard-setters stepped up in 2025 by pushing a shift from ambition to accountability. Notably, SBTI’s significant proposed revisions to the Corporate Net Zero Standard would improve progress reporting and even add a cost-per-tonne mechanism to create responsibility for ongoing emissions.

As we enter this new chapter, more companies will want to offer proof of follow-through in the form of empirical data showing that they’re adopting climate solutions. The subset of companies with an internal carbon price embrace the understanding that to put forth a credible climate strategy, details are key. In addition to showing whether companies are backing their targets with actions, details tell what companies are doing, and make it possible for learning to take place across companies.

This sort of data can be hard to capture and assess because approaches vary widely. But it’s possible. We recently analyzed the climate funding data of nearly 130 of the consumer brands that earned The Climate Label certification in 2025. The results show how they’re choosing to fund decarbonization, and preview the power that this type of data could have if collected at a larger scale.

Clearing the bar without breaking the bank

To earn The Climate Label, brands must make concrete investments in climate solutions, at a level proportionate to their carbon footprint. The level is based on a minimum internal carbon price of $15, which is applied to every tonne of their GHG emissions. The resulting dollar amount is known as a climate transition budget (CTB). Companies can only count verified decarbonization projects towards the CTB.

Last year, 96 percent of the 128 companies that earned the certification exceeded the minimum CTB of $15. Even counting companies that far exceeded the $15 per tonne level, median climate transition funding equaled just 0.3 percent of revenues, and 8 out of 10 brands met the CTB minimum for less than 1 percent of revenues.

While companies’ absolute emissions and total climate spend varied widely, CTB levels as a share of revenue showed little relationship to industry, company size or emissions profile. A meaningful level of funding for decarbonization may be more financially accessible than many companies assume.

Paying for value chain projects

A common criticism in corporate sustainability is that companies will usually opt for the easiest option—carbon credits—while continuing to make ambitious climate claims. The data, however, suggests the opposite.

Free to meet their CTBs with a mix of value chain projects and market-based mechanisms, certified companies directed an average of 70 percent of their funding into projects that involved corporate facilities and supply chains. This pattern held steady, regardless of sector or annual revenues, which ranged from a few million to hundreds of millions of dollars. Many companies noted they could better support their overall business strategy and long-term emissions reduction goals by making value chain investments.

Nonetheless, not all organizations have “shovel-ready” value chain projects at all times, particularly in the early stages of climate planning. As such, the flexibility to account for ongoing emissions by using market-based instruments, both within and beyond their value chains, remains important, and ensures that money continues to flow into climate solutions of some type.

An additional amount of funding in the 5 to 10 percent range on average went into efforts to build capacity for future value chain climate projects. Taken together, the allocations to direct mitigation efforts and capacity-building initiatives counter the notion that companies tend to rely too much on carbon credits, and instead point to a shift toward deeper, longer-term emissions reductions embedded within business operations.

Low carbon materials dominate value chain investment

As companies tackle their hard-to-abate Scope 3 emissions, they often seek to source low-carbon materials as a replacement for higher-carbon alternatives. This decarbonization lever received the greatest share of value chain funding. Adopting lower carbon materials is possible on a shorter timeline, compared to more complex operational or capital projects.

Despite a clear preference for low-carbon materials, it’s not clear that companies prioritize them based on their cost effectiveness. To document these initiatives, companies reported the estimated GHG savings of each initiative they invested in, along with price premiums. Costs per tonne ranged widely — from a few dollars per tonne to tens of thousands of dollars. Lower carbon metals and direct energy switching offered the most cost effective reductions, whereas lower carbon plastics and rubber offered the least cost effective reductions.

This exercise offered a side-by-side look at the costs of GHG abatement and helped companies understand how low carbon materials compare to other initiatives within their portfolio of decarbonization efforts. The insights can shape how these and other companies choose to allocate limited decarbonization budgets.

More project-level data is needed

Across the wider community of businesses actively involved in the climate transition, a majority aren’t well positioned to compare and identify projects with the lowest cost GHG abatement potential, because such comparative data doesn’t exist. Yet.

There is a significant opportunity to bring more climate transition funding data into the public domain by documenting it at the project level, across more companies and more projects. 

Doing so would demystify many questions about cost effectiveness, and help sustainability professionals with their climate transition planning — leading to better outcomes from their climate initiatives.

The post Funding for decarbonization is more accessible than companies think appeared first on Trellis.

The former locus for Kodak film production is Reju’s choice for its first U.S. textile recycling plant. The startup has selected Rochester, New York, as the first site for a $390 million facility that would advance a North American circular economy for polyester.

Reju has set a 2029 deadline to open a 450,000-square-foot facility that would handle 300 million pieces of clothing a year. It would occupy 18.9 brownfield acres on the 1,200-acre Eastman Business Park, originally opened by photography pioneer George Eastman in 1890. The park is home to more than 100 companies, including Reju partner Eastman Kodak as well as materials science, advanced manufacturing and chemicals businesses.

Reju, with offices in Paris, belongs to Dutch oil and gas company Technip Energies, whose technology for polymerization sits in about 1,000 polyester factories around the world. IBM originally developed Reju’s processes, which break down polyester fibers and build them back up into new polyester. The tech can manage polyester-cotton blends, too.

Polymer ‘masters’

“We’re, let’s say, the masters of the universe when it comes to how to polymerize,” said CEO Patrik Frisk, a former CEO of Under Armour.

Rochester follows Reju’s two existing plants, including at Chemelot Industrial Park in the Netherlands. The other, in Frankfurt, began shipping material to customers last year, according to Frisk.

“It’s ticking all of the boxes that we’re looking for,” Frisk said of the upstate New York site. These included proximity to a chemical park — for infrastructure access — and potential suppliers of waste, as well as supportive state and regional government, he added.

“Reju’s ambitious project will create approximately 70 new jobs at Eastman Business Park, and will show how smart investments can turn waste into opportunity, further supporting our state’s overall green economy efforts and creating a brighter future for everyone,” stated New York Governor Kathy Hochul.

Reju is continuing partnerships with Goodwill, Waste Management and other organizations that began in 2024. Waste Management has sent the company material from its curbside collection pilot programs. One such effort, in Troutdale, Oregon, ends this spring after a year of collecting clothes, linens and towels from households.

Regional circular economies

Reju has numerous rivals in its vision for a domestic circular economy for textiles. H&M-backed Syre of Sweden is developing one of several would-be “gigascale” plants by 2032. The opening date for one, in North Carolina, has been moved to 2026 from 2025.

As polyester recycled from bottles is falling out of favor among circular-economy advocates, more brands are looking to Reju and others, including Circ and Ambercycle, to provide lower-carbon polyester that derives from fashion waste instead of virgin oil. Reju says it has extensive downstream engagements with brands.

A backlash against polyester is building among consumer advocacy groups wary of the long-term effects of microfiber pollution. “We should try to use less polyester,” Frisk said. “But knowing this industry the way I know it, that is most likely not going to happen.” However, not all polyester is created equal, according to Frisk, and engineering “great polyester” can result in fibers that shed less.

In October, Reju brought together 12 fiber production, weaving and recycling companies to engage around emerging regulations, including the EU’s new extended producer responsibility rules for textiles. Their group, Circular Textile Coalition, was Reju’s response to a European Commission request to hear from more companies in textile circularity.

“This whole interest around circularity nearshoring and reshoring is real,” Frisk said. “It’s now becoming something that you should consider, for any size of brand.”

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